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Crony Socialism: Let’s Not (Yet Again) Emulate Europe

Crony Socialism is private companies using Big Government’s enormous power to better themselves – or to hobble their competition.

It is free market success stories – bailing on the free market once they’ve achieved a comfortable share of the marketplace. Choosing instead to remain in sclerotic stasis, and have Big Government save them from themselves – and others.

Which is terrible for we consumers. It is far better to have an unfettered market – where every company strives every day to improve. It constantly makes things far better and much cheaper.

When some companies get Big Government to warp the market to protect their status quo, the market sags and lags – and we all lose.

Staying ahead of the curve is hard. Continuing to create and innovate in the ways that first made you successful is a lot of work. Long term, it is far easier to cop out and cozy up to Big Government as your protector – to become a remora on the bureaucracy shark.

Almost inherently, Crony Socialism is only a possibility for Big Companies – because only big companies have the financial wherewithal to entice the Leviathan to favor them with its largess.

By and large, the Mom & Pop Shops don’t have enough coin to get the government to do their bidding. They are in fact often the targets of Crony Socialism.

Mom & Pops threaten the Big Cos – through their creation and innovation, which the latter have forsaken. So the Big Cos have Big Gov tie them in knots – with miles and miles of regulatory red tape.

But Mom & Pops aren’t Crony Socialism’s only victims. No one is safe when Big Gov plays favorites.

The Federal Communications Commission made clear today that it won’t heed Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ call to expand the scope of net neutrality to regulate the way companies connect across the physical infrastructure of the internet.

We have spent the last half decade emulating poorly-functioning Europe in myriad ways.

Glad to hear we’re not going to do it yet again with Net Neutrality – at least not down to the bizarre anti-free market levels those across the Pond are mining.

It would be better still if our Big Gov finally just gave up the Internet-uber-regulation ghost once and for all.